00:00Don't waste your time studying for a pointless degree at a mediocre university.
00:04In terms of Mickey Mouse courses, listen, this has been well chronicled for many years.
00:10Whether it's gender studies, whether it's golf course studies, I think I've seen,
00:15there's not a necessity, there's not a value in many of these degrees.
00:21Now, I know that might be uncomfortable for those people who have those qualifications,
00:24but the reality is you've got to ask yourself, what are your graduate outcomes looking like?
00:30Have you really spent three years of your life in the best possible way,
00:34and was it worth £50,000 worth of debt?
00:37Young people are coming out of university unable to get onto the housing ladder,
00:42unable and unwilling to get married, unable to start a family.
00:46Why? Because they're starting off with their hands tied behind their backs
00:51because they've been sold a lie that university was the pathway to success
00:55for hundreds of thousands of young people.
00:58It's a travesty and, quite frankly, a betrayal of the next generation.
01:04Today, about a third of those young people getting their GCSE results
01:08will have failed to pass English or maths.
01:12That's about £200,000.
01:14And that data, and the data also shows,
01:16that those children who fail Key Stage 2
01:19are more likely to end up on benefits.
01:22That costs the taxpayer £8 billion a year.
01:27We can't go on like that.
01:30Secondly, we've got too many young people who are failing in our universities
01:35because they're falling for the great university scam.
01:39Signing up to £50,000 worth of debt,
01:43possibly the largest financial commitment they will have ever made in their lives at 18,
01:49for what?
01:50To study pointless subjects at mediocre universities.
01:54I've lost count of the number of businesses who tell me
01:57graduates come to them and they don't even know how to turn on the photocopier
02:00or work the kettle.
02:02The Blairite obsession with sending 50% of our young people into universities
02:08has left a generation of young people trapped by debt
02:12because they were funnelled through a system that prizes university over skills.
02:18And it's left our labour market depleted
02:22and reliant on cheap foreign labour.
